Stuttering, Freezing, Crashing, Constant Rebooting, Pixellation, Loud Mechanical Clicking. These are all symptoms of impending hard drive failure. If you can't get past the "Almost There" startup screen during a reboot, then your hard drive has probably already failed. But fear not! This issue is fixable with a little time and/or $$.

The Symptoms

Stuttering. If, when watching TV through the tivo, the motion is not steady, but proceeds in halts and stops, this is known as stuttering. A very small amount of stuttering is normal if your video source is satellite or digital cable. If the signal to the decoder box fades, then the decoder itself could stutter, and this is recorded by the TiVo. But if playback involves consistent stuttering, it's probably the TiVo hard drive.

Freezing. The most severe kind of stuttering is actual freezing of the playback picture. The picture "pauses" and the TiVo becomes completely unresponsive to the remote. Some users have reported needing to reboot to escape from a picture freeze. This is definitely a classic symptom of hard drive failure.

Pixellation. If the picture from the TiVo looks excessively "low-resolution" or pixellated, especially on high quality settings, this could be a symptom of hard drive failure. A certain amount of pixellation is normal, since TiVo's MPEG compression is digital and lossy. A lot of pixellization is also produced by digital cable or satellite boxes. However, severe pixellization at high quality settings, especially from analog sources could be caused by a bad hard drive.

Crashing. Depending on where on the hard drive the damage is, sometimes playback will be normal, but navigating through the TiVo menus becomes slow or even crashes. The TiVo becomes sluggish or nonresponsive to the remote. Sometimes sluggishness in the menus is normal: rearranging Season Passes in the SP Manager will often take several minutes. If the TiVo happens to have just downloaded and is analyzing new guide data, it will also be sluggish. In addition, nonresponsiveness to the remote can also be caused by Infrared (IR) interference from other remotes in the room. Check all remotes for stuck buttons and weak batteries. Check the TiVo remote for weak or dead batteries. However, menu crashing or consistent sluggishness not caused by stuck remote buttons, especially in concert with other symptoms is a symptom of hard drive failure. Crashing might be normal on your Windows PC, but it is NOT normal on your TiVo.

Constant Rebooting. It is not normal for TiVo to consistently reboot on its own. You will get a reboot every six months or so in the middle of the night when the TiVo downloads new system software. This is normal. Daily, or even weekly, rebooting, however, is abnormal. Sometimes software glitches can cause this behavior too. However, rebooting in conjunction with other symptoms signals impending hard drive doom.

Loud Mechanical Clicking. If you hear loud mehcanical clicking coming from the TiVo box itself (as opposed to the TV speakers), this is also a symptom of hard drive illness. Rhythmic clicking can sometimes be caused by the fan instead of the drive, but arhythmic clicking in conjuntion with freezing or stuttering is a symptom of complete hard drive destruction in a short time.

Freezing at "Almost There." If the TiVo never gets past the "Almost there. A few more minutes, please" screen, your hard drive has probably failed. If the TiVo freezes at "Welcome. Powering Up," it may be the cable connections to the hard drive or the power supply. Give them a check.

The Green Screen of Death. If the TiVo itself thinks that there is a hard drive problem, you will see a green screen saying "A Severe Error Has Occurred" and directing you to not do anything but to leave the TiVo connected for 3 hours to try to "repair" the receiver. This is the GSOD. During this period, the TiVo is attempting to identify the bad sectors of the drive. For relatively minor problems, letting the GSOD do its thing will work. Best to leave it alone. Even if the TiVo starts working again after the GSOD, however, a degenerating disk tends to keep degenerating. Chances are good that the problem will recur.

Check These Possibilities Too

<Thanks to litzdog911!>

Some issues can mimic Hard Drive distress. See if you can exclude these issues before concluding that your drive is terminally ill:

Check your Tivo's internal temperature. If it's running too hot you'll sometimes see problems like this. Look in "Messages & Setup" -> "System Information" and scroll down a couple of pages to see the internal temperature. Anything under 50-deg C is usually OK. If it's higher than that, make sure you have good airflow under and around your Tivo. It's a good idea to raise your Tivo up an inch or so for better airflow. Some folks use pop bottle caps under each corner.

If you're comfortable opening up your Tivo (which will void your warranty if you still have one), then disconnect and reconnect all the cables leading to the hard drive(s). Sometimes connections can work loose, or tarnish, and re-seating them will help.

If your Tivo is a combination DirecTV+Tivo receiver, you should try re-seating your access card. Remove power, remove the access card, wait a few minutes, re-insert the access card, and reconnect power.

My Hard Drive is Dying. What to do?

If your hard drive is going bad, DO NOT THROW AWAY THE BOX! It is repairable, usually by replacing the hard drive. Hard drive replacement is known as "Upgrading." An entire forum is dedicated to this topic.

Firstly, if your TiVo is still under warranty, TAKE IT IN NOW before the warranty expires.

Secondly, some hard drive manufacturers have a utility program that will check the hard drive for problems, and fix them. You may be able to do this with your TiVo's drive. Check the Upgrade Forum FAQs for information about your hard drive model. You may be able to save the $$$ for a completely new drive.

If you need to replace the drive, the rule of thumb is 1 GB = 1 hour of basic quality.

When replacing a hard drive, your lifetime service STAYS with the box.

If you wish to save your recordings and preferences, the best way to do this is to buy a hard drive and install it yourself. Some computer experience is required, but otherwise the installation is quick. Most people use the Hinsdale How-To page as a guide. You should also review posts in the Upgrade Forum.

But I'm not a Computer Person!

No problem. You can order hard drives ready to plug-and-play into TiVo. You will almost certainly lose your recordings and thumbs ratings, though. You may order these drives from Hinsdale,PTV Upgrade,9th Tee, or Weeknees.

But I'm REALLY not a Computer Person!

If just opening the box gives you the willies, you still have options. Some of the above vendors will replace the drive for you... if you're willing to send in your TiVo. It's pricey, but cheaper than getting a new box.

It's also possible to sell the driveless TiVo box on eBAY and get a good price, especially if you have lifetime service.

How To Protect Yourself Against Future HD Failures

There is one very important thing you can do to extend the life of your hard drive. Hard drives are suceptible to electric spikes and surges. Be sure to at least put the TiVo on a surge protector, but a UPS is preferable. This one precaution can extend the HD's lifetime by years.

Nice post! Here are a few more tips you might want add that can cause these sorts of problems:

*** Check your Tivo's internal temperature. If it's running too hot you'll sometimes see problems like this. Look in "Messages & Setup" -> "System Information" and scroll down a couple of pages to see the internal temperature. Anything under 50-deg C is usually OK. If it's higher than that, make sure you have good airflow under and around your Tivo. It's a good idea to raise your Tivo up an inch or so for better airflow. Some folks use pop bottle caps under each corner.

*** If you're comfortable opening up your Tivo (which will void your warranty if you still have one), then disconnect and reconnect all the cables leading to the hard drive(s). Sometimes connections can work loose, or tarnish, and re-seating them will help.

*** If your Tivo is a combination DirecTV+Tivo receiver, you should try re-seating your access card. Remove power, remove the access card, wait a few minutes, re-insert the access card, and reconnect power.

I just purchased a Tivo series 2 - 40 hour unit and started having problems with stuttering and rebooting. The problems began when I extended a Season Pass recording time (to get all of 60 minutes because it started late after a b-ball game) and my wife was watching it while it was recording. While my wife was pausing\rewinding\starting again it when it began the stuttering and rebooting.

I tried restting the programming data and that did not work. I then reset everything, went through setup and since doing that this morning it has not locked up or stuttered once.

I'm hoping this was an freakish occurance due to me overloading the system but am curious if any others out there have seen this problem and had it go away forever after resetting everything.

I love the way people make up these superstitious stories to explain these things!

The TiVo's designers did anticipate that occasionally TiVo owners would fill up their hard drives (mine are 99.5% full most of the time...). The expected result of what you did is a warning that something would be deleted early, not a crash.

Unfortunately, what's likely happened is that there's a bad block somewhere near the top of the drive and your extended recording included that block. Bad blocks make TiVoes behave oddly.

So, I predict that when your TiVo gets full again (it seems to fill the drives from the bottom, so it make take a while), you'll hit this bad block and get the same problem. If you keep the recording that contains the bad block, that will prevent it from being reused, which should make the TiVo behave a bit better.

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Please do not PM me asking for TiVo backups. I don't have any.

My 60 Hour series 2 did something the other day I have not read about in the forum.

The "background" went away. So, instead of seeing the green screen with the TiVo guy and now showing...I see Now Showing with a list of my shows against a black screen. All menu options looked the same. It was tru for the main menu, the system menu - all of them. When I tried to play anything, it showed the status bars at the bottom with no green stripe - shows would not play.

I re-booted and all is fine, but I have never seen or heard of that before.

I have a TIVO model 1 that I upgraded to a 120GB+40GB unit a couple of years ago. About a year after I updated it, the unit started "pausing" at times. This occurred following a software update and has continued ever since. I am told that this was a coincidence.

I have been told that the problem was caused by bad blocks or sectors on one of the hard drives. Seeming to contradict this view are the following factors:
1) If a "pause" or "stuttering" even occurs, backing up and replaying the section always shows no "pause" or "stuttering".
2) The "pauses" can be up to 5 seconds long and when the picture restarts, it does not skip 5 seconds (if any).

This makes me think the TiVO OS is "getting busy" or some such.

I was then advised to completely erase all of the video from the disk drives and this might stop the problem. I did completely delete all video files and this had no effect. Soon after I began recording again (and before the drives were more than maybe 1/3 full) the pausing/stuttering was noticed again and it has continued.

Another person told me that TiVO has a disk drive tester program for TiVo, and maybe they do, but TiVO support denies this and I can find no such reference on this or other TiVO groups. I would surely like to run a disk check on my unit but not quite enough to go completely through the rebuild process as yet!

My daughter also has a TiVO model 1 that has just the original 40Gb drive. It is not exhibiting this problem. I do not know if this is meaningful data or not.

I have seen quite a few comments that all these pausing and stuttering problems are caused by disk drive problems. But I have not yet seen any confirmation of this assertion from people who have changed out the disk drives toward making the pausing/studdering go away. Is there some empirical evidence that replacing the disk drives is a fix in all cases?

Replacing the disk drives is not the correct solution in all cases (see some of the previous posts). In your case, it sounds like it could be a temperature problem or a problem with the motherboard or MPEG decoder. Is your TiVo's temperature normal?

Yes, The temp is 35C which is about where it always has been. "On rare occasions" (about once a month), the unit "hangs up" and I have to reboot it, but other than that and the stutter/pause problem, it gives normal operation.

It sounds like a classic drive failure to me. The drive's electronics are failing, causing delays in reading the data. The clicks are drive resets caused by the inability to read the data - the drive resets in the hope that moving the head off the track and back will allow the data to be read.

At times it's taking several seconds for the drive to complete its read cycle and during this time the TiVo is pretty much frozen, waiting for the drive to return the data.

I would have good confidence that changing the drive would fix this. If you wanted to, you could use your PC to copy your recordings to a new drive.

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Please do not PM me asking for TiVo backups. I don't have any.

Maybe it IS a drive problem, but I have never had PC drive failures act like this. PC disks always seem to either just get bad sectors/clusters or to just completely fail. Failing by delaying a read operation and then after five seconds or so "getting it read completley OK" is a failure mode I do not see in PC disk drive operation.. If I get a TiVO stutter failure in a particular spot and then reread that sam spot 10 times it always works fine. This is simply NOT like any disk problem I have seen.

If this is a common occurance, does the TiVO OS have a disk exercise/diagnostic routine? Seems like this would be an urgent built in diagnostic tool (since disk drives always fail, it is just a matter of time.) but so far that seems to be wishful thinking.

Originally posted by w2jo If this is a common occurance, does the TiVO OS have a disk exercise/diagnostic routine? Seems like this would be an urgent built in diagnostic tool (since disk drives always fail, it is just a matter of time.) but so far that seems to be wishful thinking.

Yes it does. It's called the "Green Screen of Death." (see the original post)

You can trigger a GSOD with diagnostic mode. It won't make any difference, though. The GSOD is a filesystem checker, like ScanDisk, not drive diagnostics.

You wouldn't notice a drive doing this in a PC, because the drive does deliver the data eventually and there are lots of things that make PC's hesitate momentarily. This is a major problem because the standard diagnostics run on PC's and they tend to pass drives that are doing this.

I do have a drive that behaves somewhat like this in my PC and it's usually not obvious that anything is wrong with the machine.

Yours is misbehaving so badly that the diagnostics might catch it. It sounds like there's a good chance that DiskSpeed32 would show the problem, but as you've only got one drive, this doesn't necessarily tell you anything you didn't know before.

Anyway, your options are pretty limited. You can change the hard drive yourself. That may or may not fix the problem. If it doesn't, you're no worse off than you are now as then all you can do is send the TiVo for repair under warranty or whatever. When the TiVo is fixed, you can use the new drive to increase its capacity.

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OK.. I ran the #58 cleanup mode to completion. It said it could take up to 3 hours but it only took about 15 minutes and did not erase any recordings. I was surprised on both counts. Obviously, this is not a THROUGH reading test or indeed it would have taken more than an hour to READ 160megs (120+40).

I will now do a bit of viewing and see if the exercise actually did anything except reload the Tivo OS.

Like I said, it's basically equivalent to ScanDisk - it's just checking through the metadata structures to look for corruption. As there are only a few hundred files in the system (MFS is about a few enormous files rather than lots of tiny ones as in a PC), it doesn't take very long to check.

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Please do not PM me asking for TiVo backups. I don't have any.

Proof: For six weeks I tested by unplugging my leapfrog remote extender for random periods of time. I even varied my hours and days of testing. When my leapfrog extender is plugged in, my tivo reboots almost hourly. Sometimes 3-4 times per hour!!! The hard drive was tested as perfect at least a dozen times. I used a power conditioner with a UPS backup source.

In addition, my leapfrog only confuses the Tivo to reboot when my two- 440 watt VHO Ballasts on my Fish Tank are on. On the other hand when I turn on my 220 watt VHO Blue Actnic lights, the Leapfrog causes the Tivo to lag, and stagger.

So for all you Hard-Drive Doom-Sayers: I am an advanced computer systems specialist. And I certainly give the hard drive theory merit. But I am sure glad my tivo works now. But only when my leapfrog is turned off, or when my fish are asleep.

IR interference is a serious problem. There are many possible causes. Remotes with stuck buttons (or things on top of them) are the most common cause, but remote extenders and florescent lights are also possibilities.

Normally this causes the TiVo to become unresponsive to the remote and to fail to change channel on the STB. If the TiVo is rebooted, it'll go into diagnostic mode, which really freaks people out.

I don't recall seeing reports of IR interference causing stuttering or reboots, so I think there may be more going on in your case than simply IR interference.

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Please do not PM me asking for TiVo backups. I don't have any.

I almost never watch "live TV" through the TIVO model 1, but have been doing so tonight. I notice that the "pausing/stuttering/pixelation" problems I see frequently on recordings are, if anything, quite a bit more frequent when I am watching "live" TV.

I know the Tivo records "live" while you are watching in the "live TV" programs but I am surprised that the "live" TiVO output video "stutters" when the input does not when you are watching "live" TV. Does TiVO record to disk and immediately play back in the "live TV" mode?

On the 5 to 10 second "pauses", I notice the there is often a metallic "click" noise comes from the unit during the pause. It sounds like a disk head retracting "home". When this happens, there are NO GAPS in the recording when I play it back. but there WERE jumps in the video output that skips several seconds at a time during the "live" viewing.. There are sometimes half second pauses when I play the section back, but NOT at the same points when the recording is played back repeatedly. When you play the recording back, there are NO time gaps in the playback video.

Since the recording on the disk has no gaps, does not have pauses at the same points when played back repeatedly, I have to conclude that IF this is a disk drive problem, it is a hell of a strange one! My vote would be for a processor having a stack overflow and recovering or some such similar software problem. I suggest that the "click" may be part of the software reset/restart process initializing the disk drive.. 5 to 10 seconds of "pausing" because of a hardware error is a LONG time.

Originally posted by w2jo I know the Tivo records "live" while you are watching in the "live TV" programs but I am surprised that the "live" TiVO output video "stutters" when the input does not when you are watching "live" TV. Does TiVO record to disk and immediately play back in the "live TV" mode?

Yes. That is to allow the use of trickplay features.

Quote:

On the 5 to 10 second "pauses", I notice the there is often a metallic "click" noise comes from the unit during the pause. It sounds like a disk head retracting "home".

That is the "click of doom" which ususally portends complete hard drive failure. It is not normal to hear loud mechanical clicks coming from a hard drive in use. A hard drive emitting "clicking" sounds is usually about to fail. The sound is most often caused by the heads or their armature hitting the edge or surface of the drive platters. This is indcative of a physical HD failure.

Quote:

Since the recording on the disk has no gaps, does not have pauses at the same points when played back repeatedly, I have to conclude that IF this is a disk drive problem, it is a hell of a strange one! My vote would be for a processor having a stack overflow and recovering or some such similar software problem. I suggest that the "click" may be part of the software reset/restart process initializing the disk drive.. 5 to 10 seconds of "pausing" because of a hardware error is a LONG time.

No. The software is soft, and therefore cannot make mechanical sounds. Loud clicking sounds are not normal. You can be sure that the software is not commanding the disk drive to hit the stops. Yes, 5 to 10 seconds of stopple is a lot; your drive problem is serious.

Ha.. I <know> that software is SOFT and cannot <itself> make clicking sounds! However, the software is in full control of the disk drive and if the software malfunctions, it can cause all sorts of phenomenon including reset/restart of the disk drive. You can only diagnose this sort of thing by instrumenting the software and investigating from the software side.

It can be hardware or it can be software. Just because changing the hardware (and reloading all the software) fixes a problem is (in my experience with computer systems) no assurance that hardware item was at fault. Software can do strange things. But.. It would be awfully easy for the TiVO designers to instrument the software so as to actually discover the problem and provide guidance to customers. According to TiVO support, there is no such facility in TiVo and no facility for defragging or testing the HD..

Oh Well.. A first generation product and it is pretty nice as it is.

I think I will take out both drives and replace with a new 160meg drive if this is possible.. Anyone know if the Tivo model 1 software accepts maxtor 160meg drives? Then I will put the two old disk drives on test for a few days and see if my disk diagnostic/exerciser program has a problem.

You can't use a 160Mb drive as the A drive in a TiVo as the drive can't be smaller than your original drive space. You could use a 160Mb drive as the B drive, but it would only give you a few minutes of recording space.

Instead of using that old drive, consider buying a new drive. The current ones are much larger - a thousand times or more - which would give you a useful amount of recording time.

(You can only use the first 137Gb of a 160Gb drive (although you can fit two of them) with the stock kernel. You can use the full capacity of the disk (or even larger drives) if you replace the kernel).

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Please do not PM me asking for TiVo backups. I don't have any.

I have a series one with 2 drives, a 30gb original and an additional 120gb, no other mods. This setup has worked flawlessly for the last 2.5 years! My system is freezing completely more and more often to the point that I have to disconnect the power to reboot it. How can I determine which is the bad drive to replace?